Category Archives: News stories

“We know we are a day early, however we here at Merrimack Police felt compelled to let the public know that there is a warrant for Punxsutawney Phil! We have received several complaints from the public that this little varmint is held up in a hole, warm and toasty. He told several people that Winter would last 6 more weeks, however he failed to disclose that it would consist of mountains of snow! If you see him, do not approach him as he is armed and dangerous. Call Merrimack Police, we will certainly take him into custody!”

When we lived in Seattle, we experienced Snowpocalypse in 2010 and Snowmageddon 2012. Last year, we had the Polar Vortex in Western MA. This week, we were warned to be ready for bombogenesis, or, a meteorological bomb. (As it turned out, the blizzard fizzled to snow flurries. Instead of feet of snow, we received inches.) How many different ways can weather gurus describe a winter snow storm?

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 50,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 19 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Can you have a God-neutral faith? Can you have religion without God? Can you have the benefits of church and yet have a hesitant or non-existent faith?

Author T. M. Luhrman, a professor of anthropology at Stanford University, answers all of these questions with “Yes” in her article, “Religion without God.”

She concludes the article with these thoughts,

Religion is fundamentally a practice that helps people to look at the world as it is and yet to experience it — to some extent, in some way — as it should be. Much of what people actually do in church — finding fellowship, celebrating birth and marriage, remembering those we have lost, affirming the values we cherish — can be accomplished with a sense of God as metaphor, as story, or even without any mention of God at all.

Yet religion without God may be more poignant. Atheists trust in human relations, not supernatural ones, and humans are not so good at delivering the world as it should be. Perhaps that is why we are moved by Christmas carols, which conjure up the world as it can be and not the world we know.

May the spirit of Christmas be with you, however you understand what that means.

Ms. Luhrman’s conclusions reminded me of what the apostle Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 3:1-5 regarding what will take place in the last days.

“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be … having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power.” (2 Timothy 3:1, 2, 5)

People try to find meaning in religion and rituals. Yet they completely miss the point that salvation, forgiveness, purpose, significance are only possible through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

The online edition of Leadership Journal December 2014 contains an insightful article, “The Painful Lessons of Mars Hill.” Having lived and ministered in Seattle, and pastored a church not far from the Mars Hill main campus, I have followed the church’s story with great interest, concern, and empathy. While perhaps not the final word on the subject, the author, Ben Tertin, has added some wise insights as to why things went downhill.

(Bill) Clem pastored alongside Driscoll for more than half a decade, and he refuses to single out Driscoll, church structure, staff culture, or any problem as the one that “necessitated wrapping the car around the pole,” as he puts it. Perhaps no singular, simple answer will ever emerge.

Nevertheless, Clem says, the structure of Mars Hill—which over time consolidated power and financial decisions in the central organization—did play a role. “As the structure became more refined, the driving motive became efficiency and growth, and those two factors began dictating church policy.”

Tim Gaydos, pastor and elder at Mars Hill’s downtown Seattle campus from 2006-2013, sees principles from Galatians 2 playing out here. “This all began as a work of the Spirit,” he comments, “but we quickly started to push harder and harder, trying to accomplish it with human efforts—bigger, better, faster, stronger.”

“One of the things that drew my wife and me in early was being involved in a particular neighborhood context, operating with a strong theology of time and place,” Gaydos says. “But that started to shift significantly—to focus more on expansion to wherever we could find podcasters to set up a new site.”

Welcome to the whole Seattle mindset, Clem says. “Some say, ‘Let’s deliver packages,’ but Seattle says, ‘No. Let’s make it Amazon.’ Some say, ‘Let’s have coffee,’ but Seattle says, ‘No. Let’s make it Starbucks.’ ‘Let’s have a grocery store.’ ‘No! Let’s make it Costco.’ Microsoft. Google. Boeing. Seattle is about power, expansion, and world domination.”

The principle held true when that corporate drive took hold of Mars Hill.

His analysis of the Seattle mindset of “bigger is always better” is certainly spot on. The culture of Costco, Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, etc., certainly added a unique pressure to ministry and especially to people’s expectations.

The author closes his article with four wise observations and principles for churches and pastors to keep in mind.

The Mars Hill empire has collapsed, under the weight of business principles gone wrong and the lie of celebrity ministry. But the key rot in the Mars Hill roots wasn’t just the structure; it was the source of dependence.

“When it is dependent upon one charismatic leader,” says McKnight, “it is not dependent on Jesus.”

What if Mars Hill’s elder board had been able to keep things properly Christ-centered? What if, from the onset, the church’s DNA actively demanded Christian maturity and biblical wisdom over celebrity, expansion, and influence? We can only speculate, and seek to learn from the rubble of the Mars Hill collapse. Four key principles emerge:

1. A pastor’s character shapes the church.

Pastors and leaders need to stop obsessing over methodology and cultivate the fruit of the Spirit in their lives. Schlaepfer says, “You need to realize the fact that you are going to reproduce your soul in your church, whether you intend to or not. And if you are sarcastic and defensive and arrogant, that’s going to be reproduced in your people. Your soul, the fruit of the Spirit that’s in your life, your strength and weaknesses as a leader, are going to be reproduced in that church.”

2. “Submitted” does not mean “quiet.”

“I am wrestling now with what loyalty means,” says Clem, looking back on his days as a Mars Hill pastor. “I feel like I kept quiet as a pastor and elder at Mars Hill in a commitment to ‘unity.’ I put up with stuff I probably should not have put up with because I thought I was submitting to authority.

“But you know, Paul ironically writes ‘submit to authorities’ while he was in prison! For him, submission looked like ‘I’m going to do what I need to do under God, and you do what you need to do; you have the right to it.’ Whereas non-submission is ‘I get to do whatever I want, and you don’t have any right to punish me for it.'”

3. Beware of false “success.”

Statements like, “Good leaders have followers” or “Living things grow” become mantras at churches like Mars Hill, says Gaydos. This logic extrapolates quickly to “great leaders have tons of followers” and “the faster things grow, the more alive they are.” Soon, small attendance numbers and slow growth become problems to conquer.

“Beware of the theology of victory, which I think is very prominent in America,” Gaydos says. “This victory theology is ‘get upstream,’ ‘let’s change culture,’ ‘let’s change the world,’ ‘let’s start a movement’ kind of thinking. We become more concerned with ‘doing something great’ and less concerned with simply living as a faithful presence and witness in our neighborhoods and cities.

“If you are finding yourself worrying about ‘leaving a legacy’ or ‘What does the city think about what we’re doing’ or ‘What will you leave behind,’ soon it will be all about your movement and not about your relationship with Jesus at all, simply receiving his love and presence.”

Every young pastor needs to have a mentor relationship with a pastor who has been pastoring for at least 25 years in a church that is ‘not’ a megachurch. “You first need to know what it means to be a godly church, and then figure out how that affects the city,” says Clem. “Do not say, ‘Our number one goal is to impact the city, and hopefully we won’t compromise being the church while doing that.'”

4) Emulate Christ’s servant-leadership.

McKnight comments, “Jesus offers what I think is the most significant statement about leadership in the entire Bible that will lead us toward a gospel culture. He uses language that we are all afraid of. He says that you are not to be called Rabbi, you are not to call anyone father, you are not to be called instructors, because you have one teacher—Jesus, and you have one Father—God the Father, and you have one instructor—the Messiah. The greatest will be your servant.

“So, a gospel culture is created when the pastor is the most submissive to Jesus in the culture itself. When he models discipleship the most, he will never suffer from creating a toxic culture.

“For this reason, every young pastor needs to have a mentor relationship with a pastor who has been pastoring for at least 25 years in a church that is not a megachurch. They will learn what true pastoring is really like, not celebrity pastoring.”

City of Houston demands pastors turn over sermons – “The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.”

In “Burning Bridges,” (Season 5, Episode 3) of the CBS drama, Blue Bloods, NYPD Commissioner Frank Regan, played by Tom Selleck, makes a passing comment to the press that the Catholic Church is behind the times on its stance on homosexuality. This, despite the fact that his character is a staunch Catholic.

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Followers of Christ are once again faced with the question – Who sets the standards for faith and practice–culture, the Christian community, or the commandments of God? Do we follow society, saints, or the Scriptures?

It may become increasingly lonely to be an evangelical and to hold fast to what Scripture teaches.

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John 15:18–19 – “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

Luke 18:8 – I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

This afternoon I received a robo call on my cell phone. The recording said my B of A debit card had been locked and that I was to press “1” to be transferred to the department that could help me resolve the problem. It sounded too much like a scam, so I hung up. I then called B of A directly and talked to a real person. Sure enough, it was a scam, and one that the bank has received a number of calls about. I’m not sure how they got my cell number or knew which bank I was with, but it was cause for caution and a healthy skepticism.